For Only the Second Time, a President Trump Tweet Has Achieved 'Ratio' Status

His most vile tweets rarely spark such ire. But one on Saturday about San Juan's mayor did just that.

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By
Luke O'Neil

It is nearly unheard of for Donald Trump to post a bad tweet. Yes, that sounds implausible, and if we’re judging by the actual content of his posts, the exact opposite is surely true. But based on the Ratio—the theorythat if the number of replies to any given tweet outpaces the number of retweets or likes, then you’ve screwed up terribly—the president is virtually undefeated.

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Donald Trump simply cannot be Ratio’d.

Until he is.

Twitter is maybe the only area where all the winning Trump promised has come true. Even his most unpopular tweets, the ones that lead cable news and drive the discussion online for the day—the ones that have us clawing out our hair and wondering what we did to deserve such a leader—simply are not bad enough to qualify for the Ratio.

Although the number of likes on Trump's tweets have declined since his inauguration—from around 150,000 likes per tweet to 50,000, according to an analysis by the digital marketing agency Huge—they're almost never eclipsed by the comments. A quick look at 50 recent Trump tweets from Monday to Friday of last week, for instance, found an average of 18,700 replies, 17,000 retweets, and 72,600 likes.

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All of which is to point out how truly, impressively, and odiously the president fucked up with his tweet on Saturday about San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz speaks to the media on Saturday.

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After pleading for more aid for the people of her city ravaged by Hurricane Maria, Cruz caught the ire of the president, who sent out a series of characteristically childish, impulsive, spiteful, and barely veiled racist tweets in response. Among them was this corker: “...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….”

Almost instantly, the tweet landed in Ratio territory:

9 am: 12,500 replies to 13,500 likes.

11 am: 29,100 replies to 25,600 likes.

1 pm: 38,000 replies to 33,000 likes.

3 pm: 44,000 replies to 38,000 likes.

San Juan residents sit in their apartment with the window blown out by the winds of Hurricane Maria.

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It should go without saying that the president of the United States blaming the mayor of an American city—in the very midst of a tragedy—for the suffering of her constituents, not to mention the dogwhistle racism about Puerto Ricans looking for handouts, would be met with horror, but this is hardly the first time he’s tweeted something so callous and cruel.

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Curiously, one of the last times Trump flirted with a Ratio tweet was when he lashed out similarly at the mayor of London following an attack on the London bridge, a tweet whose replies outpaced likes for much of the day before a suspicious spike in likes all at once. (A recent Twitter Audit finds that only 63% of his 39.7 million followers are authentic accounts, and there has been suspicion raised over the course of the past year that many millions may have been purchased, or so-called bots, that engage with his account in an automated fashion.)

A few weeks later, he pulled off what was, until now, the only standing instance of a Ratio tweet, when he mocked Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski for bleeding from a facelift.

It would be tempting to say that there are two things that even Trump cannot get away with—mocking a local leader in the midst of a tragedy, and belittling a woman, and his tweet on Saturday pulls off the rare double duty of doing both—but that is probably wishful thinking. In the meantime, those rightfully ashamed of his tweets about Puerto Rico can take some small solace that, like the rule of law, while it can be avoided for a while, eventually the Ratio comes for us all.